SOC 531: Community Organization

Fall 2010

In my Middletown documents I make reference to Gilman's comments on housekeeping,

Which is from Herland, her utopian novel, which we are not reading this semester. Here are some notes on her and that book, in case you are interested.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), Herland

Charlotte Perkins was the great niece (the daughter of the nephew) of the famous Beecher girls: Catherine Beecher (domestic feminism), Isabella Beecher Hooker (suffragist), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin). Hers was a family of writers. Her father was a magazine editor, and she later followed in his footsteps, but he abandoned his family when Charlotte was six, leaving his wife and children in poverty (or, more accurately perhaps, relying on the kindness of more stable relatives). Charlotte managed to study design and to work a few years as a greeting card designer before she tried domestic bliss, marrying an artist (Charles W. Stetson) in 1884. Apparently, she had struggled with depression from childhood, but postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter landed her in an institution. Here she found the inspiration to launch her career as a writer and socialist feminist cultural critic. The Yellow Wallpaper (a favorite among cultural critics, first published in New England Magazine in 1892) was based on her husband's and her doctor's efforts to help her recover by taking away her artistic and literary tools so that she might dedicate herself to domesticity. Needless to say, she rejected this advice and left her husband. Some sources suggest that she left her daughter with her husband after their divorce (in 1894), although Kathy Casey (Note, p. iii, Herland [Dover 1998 edition]) suggests that Gilman supported her child for years, until her ex-husband married her friend (see

Anyway, we all agree that she was not able to raise her daughter and pursue her career and chose the later as the path to sanity. She edited The Impress (1893-4) and published a book of poetry (1893), along with "The Yellow Wallpaper" (in 1892), and published her most sociological tome, Women and Economics (in 1898). She married her cousin, George Houghton Gilman, a lawyer, in 1900. She was the founding editor of Forerunner (1909-1916) and founded the Women's Peace Party in 1915 (co-founder with our old friend, Jane Addams, from Hull House, Chicago). She was the first radical feminist utopian novelist, a socialist and a feminist, apparently inspired by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward.

She anticipates the work of radical feminists, Nancy Chodorow, Mothering, and Shulamath Firestone, TheDialectics of Sex, who viewed the role of mother or the heterosexual relationship as the base of oppression. These writers, together with Marge Piercey, Woman on the Edge of Time (twentieth century radical feminist dystopian or utopian [depending on which world you perceive as "real"] novel) all reject heterosexual relations and are thus often referred to as "radical lesbian feminist" theorists, even if they are not lesbians. Sexual preference is not the point. Perkins [Stetson] Gilmanpracticed serial monogamy in the contemporary American (sic) tradition. Her protagonist in Herland enjoyed a sexless and childless marriage, which seems to be offered as the ideal and might have been the norm in the golden years of depression era marriages, after the baby boomers had left the nest, at least among Catholics who didn't believe in divorce or birth control.

Unlike these good Catholics, Gilman was a socialist. She lamented that every industry except for domestic labor had been industrialized, so that precious little human labor yielded an abundance of products. Perhaps she would have welcomed the "problem without a name" (Betty Friedan, The Feminist Mystique), but she really thought that the kitchen had no place in the home and that women should be free to be all that they can be. Her argument, in light of what bell hooks and W.E.B. DuBois have said, reminds me of something that Angela Davis wrote (Women, Race, and Class). Black women have always worked. They worked in the fields and in the house, as slaves and as freedmen.

Perhaps I should add that although Gilman was not credentialed as a sociologist she did hang out with Lester Ward and join in the critique of social Darwinism and the progressive struggles to liberate women (if not blacks) from oppression. Her sequel to Herland (With Her in My Land[or something like that]) deals with race and other less than savory aspects of the U.S. in the Gilded (or Progressive) Age.

Questions for consideration:

Is there a feminist community?

Can men and women really live together in the same community?

What is a race? In what sense do women in Herland constitute a race while blacks in Philadelphia do not?

How are racial and gender divisions within communities different?

Is Herland a community?

If community really is a state of mind then Herland is as real as any of our imaginary communities—right?

Is a nation just a big community, or do communities have to be smaller?

How should we mark the boundaries of communities?